Bile and Blood: Galaxy of Exiles, #2

By Katherine Franklin

The galaxy hangs on the brink of chaos. Someone is about to give it a shove.

An uneasy truce holds in a war-ravaged galaxy. A troubled Palia has been left with only fragments of her memories after a catastrophic event. With Ferrash now in hiding, she is convinced everyone blames her for his departure. Keen to make things right, the empyrric resolves to find him and fix what's broken.

Deep in his own mission, Ferrash makes a dangerous journey back into a society where emotions are illegal to infiltrate its government. But lacking control over his emotions, the spy-turned-rogue risks blowing his cover before he can incite rebellion.

When war breaks out again, Palia and Ferrash find themselves on opposing sides. Struggling to control her empyrric power and worried Ferrash is about to make a deadly mistake, Palia wades into battle to find him.

Can she stop his multi-layered plans from causing more bloodshed, or has Ferrash ignited a fire they can't extinguish?

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Bile and Blood is the second book in the Galaxy of Exiles series, a science-fiction space opera about a galaxy under the pall of weaponised emotions. Immerse yourself in a detailed universe of heroes, villains and more. If you like page-turning futuristic action, you'll love this.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Franklin
• Release date: Apr 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915007049

Katherine Franklin

Katherine Franklin spends far more of her days than is healthy glued to a screen, writing stories when she’s not writing code, but she manages to venture outside once in a while as well. She loves science, but didn’t love her physics degree enough to do anything about it. Fiction was always her first love. Katherine lives in Yorkshire with her husband and a horse-sized dog, where she practices martial arts, miniature painting and far too many little hobbies to count in her spare time.

Book preview

Previously, in The Empyrean…

Empyrean fire burned the planet Everatus IV, taking the life of Palia’s young son. Palia herself escaped in an emergency shuttle, shocked unconscious by the flames of a force that underpins everything in this galaxy. The Empyrean is a sixth sense accessible to a few fading bloodlines in the Hegemony Palia lives in, more widespread in the Protectorate, where emotions are suppressed across the population. Empyrrics can sense emotions using the Empyrean, strip them, convert them into energy and hurl them back against their owners.

Palia was rescued by two Protectorate spies, Ferrash and Bek, who spotted her shuttle amidst the planetary debris. They brought her to the Protectorate, where she discovered the shock of the planet’s death had made her empyrric. They fled the capital together and began their search for answers in earnest.

They discovered that it was Palia’s second cousin, the Magister of the Hegemony, who destroyed Everatus IV using a weapon that could remove an empyrric’s connection to the Empyrean. Disillusion and betrayal saw the spies defect from the Protectorate, and Palia recruited her old flame Fabien to lead a coup against the Magister.

After a fight aboard the flagship, Palia and Ferrash defeated the Magister together. But Palia’s inexperience with the Empyrean led to her destroying all her memories of Ferrash and stripping Ferrash of all his emotions. Ferrash slipped into the shadows, leaving Palia alone.

Now, Palia is determined to find Ferrash and repair the damage she caused, but Ferrash has his own agenda. With a fragile ceasefire holding between Hegemony and Protectorate, can Palia find him before it’s too late?

* * *

Have you forgotten what happened in The Empyrean or want to find out more about the Galaxy of Exiles? Check out the wiki at www.worldanvil.com/w/galaxy-of-exiles-franklywrites

Chapter One

Palia had never been to a funeral. All her grandparents had died before she was born and the tour of duty she had undertaken as part of her mandatory service, in peacetime as it was, had been remarkably uneventful. She had never been to the Origin system either, yet here she was, on the curated world of Viken’s Garden, burying her son.

There was nothing to bury. When the Magister had burned Everatus IV in Empyrean fire, he had torn Derren away with it. If you were a stickler for common belief, then it was the tides of empyrric energy known as Varna – only visible to the naked eye when travelling between nexuses or witnessing the Empyrean’s use – where souls went when people died. If you believed that, you believed in the transfer of energy from one source to another. A practical, physical perspective. If the belief held true, it meant Derren’s soul was trapped somewhere in the nexite batteries of the Hegemony’s flagship, along with everything else that had died on the planet.

Palia didn’t know what she believed.

Blinking awake from where she had retreated to the depths of her mind, she realised everyone was waiting for her. She couldn’t see her mother, but she felt the cold heat of her gaze. Fabien stood to one side with tears in his eyes, framed by the trunks of two whisper-trees that became entwined amongst their upper branches. A steady breeze brushed against her skin. It carried upon it the scent of fresh life, of bare earth, of water running to meet the sea. Life, on a world of death. Or perhaps it was the other way round?

Palia drew a breath past the tightness in her chest and stepped forwards, then knelt to pick up the sapling the curator had placed there for her. Its leaves rustled when she lifted it, bright and glimmering. Green, of course. How did nobody get the irony of that? Green was the colour of the flames, and everything that had gone wrong since. A wave of nausea rose to her throat at the memory of the inferno siphoning him away. She hadn’t been fast enough. She hadn’t been close. He hadn’t deserved to die, and he had deserved better than her.

‘Do you have any words for him?’ the curator asked. Her words were gentle, but Palia resented them nonetheless.

Palia lowered the sapling into its pre-dug hole and pushed her fingers into the loose soil. ‘If I did, I should have said them while he was alive.’ After a few pats to firm up the soil around its trunk, she pushed herself upright. ‘There’s no point now.’ Nothing that makes up for it.

For the thousandth time, she felt the guilt of not being able to save him and not being able to mourn him for so long afterwards. She was past that stage now, she hoped. Half-welcome grief sat curdling in her gut, aching in her bones, clutching at her throat. Palia clenched her fists tight, grinding soil into her palms, but it wasn’t the grief that made her do it. It was the emotions she saw in the landscape of the Empyrean – in others, not herself. They judged her. Maybe they didn’t mean to, but they judged her, the mother of the dead and the only one with a face unmarked by tears.

She was sick of it. Sick of reuniting with people she had known since childhood and having their deepest feelings laid bare to her. The sooner she could get out of here and back to finding Ferrash, the better. It was the only one of her mistakes she still had the power to fix – she hoped.

‘I... could say something, if you aren’t able,’ Fabien offered.

Palia nodded, flashed him a half-grateful smile, then turned on a heel and walked away. The pressure of everyone’s gazes weighed upon her back.

Overhead, the light of Origin’s star glimmered through the emerald canopy. Palia was happy she had come here, at least – happy to put Derren’s memory to rest, even if she couldn’t speak for his soul, or his remains. If he was in Varna, perhaps some part of what once was him would become life on this planet, at peace, in time.

Leaves crunched behind her. Palia tensed her shoulders, not wanting to turn and see who it was in case it was someone she didn’t want to speak to.

‘Are you okay?’ a woman asked.

Palia relaxed. It was just Emesi, a friend from her time in the Hegemony military.

‘I...’ Palia’s words caught in her throat. Grief bubbled up from where she had left it. ‘Fires, why do those three words always do that?’

‘Oh ancestors, Palia, I’m sorry. I just...’ Emesi stepped in front of her and bundled her into a tight hug, her mohawk tickling the side of her face. ‘I never know what to say.’

‘I know.’ When Emesi drew back to regard her with a raised eyebrow, Palia stammered, ‘I mean, I don’t know... I mean, I do, but...’ She hissed air out between her teeth. ‘Ah, forget it.’

‘It’s that confusing?’

‘It was at first. Now, it’s just confusing to explain.’

‘But you’re coping with it?’

Palia hesitated. Bright sympathy pulsed from Emesi’s core – along with a tangle of curiosity, and excitement, and fear. The realisation brought with it a wash of sadness. More than ever, Palia wanted to be away from here. All her old friends, alien enough after her long absence, were made more alien now the Empyrean made her see them so completely.

But Palia sighed and said, ‘I’m coping.’

Emesi kept her stare fixed on her a few moments longer, trying to read in Palia what Palia could tell at a glance. Then she nodded and glanced over Palia’s shoulder. Her mouth opened and closed while she pondered her next words. ‘I... I’m sorry about Derren. When I heard, I...’

When Emesi had heard, she had probably been surprised that Derren existed at all. A misunderstanding, plus some heavy assumptions and legally questionable actions on the part of Palia’s mother, meant that her son had been grown in a vat without her knowledge. Like most people, Palia had placed her genetic material in storage the moment she was old enough. Better safe than sorry, or so she thought. Palia found out Derren existed a month before his birth and chose to keep him despite the anger that had lodged in her heart. The moment they had taken Derren from the vats, Palia had cut herself off from her friends and family to live on the fringe of Hegemony space, far from everyone else. She certainly hadn’t stopped to tell her friends about him.

And there it was, nestled at the centre of Emesi’s being: resentment for that fact. It was a leap to assume the cause – the Empyrean didn’t reveal such details – but a logical one.

‘What’s done is done,’ said Palia. The words were familiar by now.

Emesi nodded and stared at the stream rushing past to her left. ‘Where are you headed next?’

‘I can’t say,’ Palia said, and the tone of her voice caught Emesi’s attention. When Emesi looked up, she almost seemed impressed.

‘War gives us all interesting jobs. I wish you luck with yours. Are you leaving straight away?’ Palia nodded. ‘You might want to speak with your mother, first.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I didn’t get the impression she would leave you with a choice.’

Palia sighed and cast an eye in the direction of the landing pad. ‘Thanks for the warning. I’d better head off.’

They said their goodbyes and parted ways – probably for the last time, Palia thought. Whatever commonality had been between them was gone.

On the walk back to the shuttles, Palia distracted herself with the wildlife she passed. Colourful birds darted from branch to branch within the canopy, singing as they went and chasing loud insects through the leaves. One passed by inches from her face, unafraid of human presence. From time to time she spotted barklizards resting between tree roots. A whole family of them watched her pass from the safety of their trunk-bored nest, their eyelids flickering. She categorised them all, matched them to archive records, made notes of her own. Anything to keep her mind occupied. Anything to keep it away from the void.

Days were short on Viken’s Garden. The sun shone directly overhead by the time Palia reached the vine-covered shuttle post that served as the planet’s only landing zone. She squinted at the sky, hoping to catch sight of the flagship in orbit but coming away disappointed.

She started up the entrance ramp and sent a message to Bek via her implants. She wondered what he had been up to while she was gone.

he sent back.

Palia passed by the reception kiosk and nodded to the automated assistant, then booked a shuttle launch via her implants and made her way to its hangar.

Bek had never seen a child. He hadn’t grown up in a society that structured its culture around them. He hadn’t, in many respects, grown up at all. Was she setting his expectations for every funeral?

she sent.

Only one word, but Palia couldn’t help projecting disgust onto it. Something new and precious to Bek’s mind was gone, and she didn’t have anything to say.

Decontaminant spray washed over her as she stepped through the hangar boundary, cementing the weariness in her face. She frowned at the ground beneath her feet as she walked. Seamless floor panels gave way to the shuttle ramp, then to anti-static carpet.

‘Palia,’ her mother called.

Startled, Palia fell the rest of the way to her seat and landed with a thump. Her mother stood beyond the shuttle door. Before Palia could protest, she entered the cabin, the door resealing behind her. The engines hummed to life.

Palia spammed the command to cancel the launch order.

‘Were you going to leave without speaking to me at all?’ From the tone of her mother’s voice, she could have been speaking about something as harmless as forgetting to clean her teeth. But there was pain buried behind her eyes, clawing at her heart.

Palia hated that she could see it. She hated that her new sense could humanise in seconds people she had spent years demonising. She hated that she couldn’t cast aside what she saw just as much as she hated herself for being bitter enough to try. She pressed her lips together, tried to keep her words in check.

‘I hadn’t intended to speak to you ever again, if I could help it,’ Palia said. ‘Apparently, I couldn’t.’

Flickering needles of hurt pricked her mother’s skin in the landscape of the Empyrean, and she lowered herself onto a seat opposite Palia. Her gaze flicked over Palia’s hair, which Palia hadn’t seen the point in dyeing since the death of Everatus IV had shocked it white. Her mother’s hair was still hazel, the colour they used to share, but grey streaked it here and there.

‘I’m sorry about Derren,’ her mother said.

Sorry that he died, or sorry that he existed? It’s a bit late to apologise for the latter.

After a few more moments’ silence, her mother added, ‘I’d like to know what happened afterwards. If you want to tell me.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Palia, you were gone for years, you nearly died and then... I don’t even know what happened after that. Fabien won’t tell me anything. That woman from the arsaeria just shrugged. Your ship has no designation, so I couldn’t send a message. All I know, I got from the news feeds. The news feeds, Palia! They say you became empyrric, killed the Magister and stopped the Protectorate homeworld getting... burned? Blown up? I don’t know.’

Palia shrugged. ‘That’s pretty much it.’

Her mother scoffed, and Palia noted the frustration rising in her with weary resignation. ‘But how did you escape Everatus Four? Where did you go afterwards? I just... I want to understand, Palia.’

‘You’ve never wanted to understand before.’ This was a woman so prone to misunderstanding that she had interpreted ‘my daughter is in a relationship’ as ‘my daughter certainly wants to stay with this man forever and a surprise child will be a perfect gift’ – not that Palia pretended to understand what had been going through her mother’s head back then.

What could Palia say, anyway? That she was picked up by spies and they took her into the Protectorate? That they hatched a plan against the Magister together? That she killed people to do it? Good people? Allies? That she fell in love with someone and couldn’t even remember his face?

‘I know I did wrong by you and Derren.’ Her mother leaned towards her, hands palm upwards on each knee, begging. ‘I didn’t understand until it was too late but I tried, I tried afterwards. And you didn’t give me a chance, you just—’

‘Left. Zashen right I left,’ Palia cursed, then dropped to a whisper, as if saying it here, on this funeral world, was a crime. ‘You gave me a son I never asked for, a son I never signed for—’

‘I offered to sign for him.’

‘He was my blood!’ As she said it, her control slipped, and sheets of green light flickered around her arms. Her mother pressed herself against the side of the shuttle. ‘If you wanted someone else to carry on the family for you, you should have used your own. Not mine. Not Fabien’s. You forged our signatures on the contract, so don’t tell me you didn’t know it was wrong, that it wasn’t against the law.’

‘I—’

‘Get out.’

‘At least speak to your—’

‘Out!’

With a strangled cry – of frustration or fear, Palia couldn’t tell – her mother bolted from her seat and exited the shuttle. As soon as she had, Palia threw a command to the shuttle’s computer and launched herself far, far away from the planet, her family, and whatever parts of her old life she might still have been able to recover.

There had been no going back after the flames, and there never would be. All she could do now was keep running forwards, after Ferrash.

Chapter Two

Ferrash tried to ignore the way his hands shook as he clipped the ends of his belt together, but his mind fixated on it. The shaking was a sign of weakness. A sign he’d taken too many emotional inhibitors. A sign of how messed up things had become in the depths of his subconscious. And, as sights went, it was the safest one in the room.

Rustling sounded from the bed behind him. The woman’s breathing – heavy, but fast being wrested to normality – cut a sawblade through the silence.

Ferrash gritted his teeth and reached over to a small side table for his pistol and coat. The contents of his stomach made a foray into his throat, and he did all he could not to throw up the little he’d eaten that day. It was just the drugs. Too many inhibitors, combined with whatever they’d given him to get through this. That was all. He shrugged into his coat, gripped his pistol tight enough to ground himself in reality.

His obligation here was done. His years of dodging the breeding programme were over, but maybe now he’d participated, the Protectorate would wait a few years before asking again. With any luck, the programme wouldn’t exist by then anyway. The sooner he left and put it behind him, the better.

‘Are you unwell?’ the woman behind him asked.

Ferrash curled his fingers in the air halfway to the door membrane, then dropped his hand and glanced over his shoulder.

The attendant stood bathed in the murky amber of the room’s lighting panels, her eyes flat, reflecting most of it back at him. Her expression held no curiosity, as there had been none in her voice. She stepped back into her underwear with an almost robotic precision.

‘I’m well, Attendant,’ Ferrash said. A part of him barely recognised his own voice, an intentionally dull monotone.

The attendant – one of the more junior ranks of keeper, though a keeper nonetheless – paused with one trouser leg on, one off. ‘There is a troubled note to you. If you are not in your right mind, the process may have been inefficient. You should recentre yourself so there may be a second attempt.’

‘That won’t be necessary.’ He caught himself before he thought on her words too much. ‘Any trouble on my part won’t have affected the results.’ Besides, he had other duties to attend to.

‘You took longer than expected.’

On detecting a slight hesitation in her words, Ferrash regarded her more closely. Her white-flecked eyebrows had dipped a fraction lower, and her posture struck him as... not vulnerable, but uncertain. For a second, he saw Palia’s face in hers, but the image vanished in the time it took to drum across the surface of his heart.

It was the attendant’s first time in the programme. Any descendant of an empyrric bloodline had to participate – her as a full-blooded empyrric, Ferrash with an empyrric mother. The Keepers needed to keep their numbers strong, and empyrrics could only be born naturally, not created in the vats. Hence the breeding programme. The act they had just done was illegal for any other purpose in the Protectorate.

So of course she didn’t know how it was supposed to work. The preparatory material boiled down to a minute-long projection with scientific annotations and blunt instructions. She’d probably had the splitting thing playing in her implants through it all. Biology didn’t like sticking to scripts.

Ferrash cleared his throat, pushing the thought to the back of his mind. ‘Time taken doesn’t impact anything as long as the criteria were satisfied.’

She said nothing, but if Ferrash were a keeper like her, he’d surely have seen doubt radiating from her.

‘It just doesn’t work like that.’ He almost said trust me, but experience wasn’t the best admission, given the circumstances.

The attendant pulled her robe from its hook on the wall, so he made for the door, but he didn’t miss her final words.

‘Given your previous success, I shall take your judgement as sound.’

The door membrane resolidified over her last word, swallowing it. Ferrash held its memory at arm’s length until he had navigated the three staircases and long corridor that led to the comparative freedom of the outside world.

Snow slashed across his cheeks. He drew in a stinging breath and let it out slowly, trying to loosen the tension he’d worked up, balling his hands into fists to stop the tremors. He strode into the storm, kicking drifts of snow from the floor. The roads here didn’t attract many visitors. Too many keepers nearby.

That’s why he only let his attention fall on the attendant’s words when he was clear of the Keepers’ buildings.

Previous success? Ferrash had been dodging the breeding programme for over a decade. This was his first tasking as well as hers – no ‘previous’ example existed, success or no. So what did she mean? It couldn’t just be strange ideas about what free agents got up to in their free time; the wording was too specific. She referred to one incident in particular. Problem was, the only child he had fathered was dead. Unless...

Something sick curled in the pit of his stomach and he hissed a slow breath into the night air. Things like this were dangerous to think about. He had to focus on the mission.

It was a mild night, for Hesperex. But for the occasional flurry, snow fell uninterrupted by the wind. Its usual icy knives had been sheathed. Now he had put more distance between himself and The Hotel – or the Residence of the Empyrric Procreation Programme – plenty of people walked the streets. The lights on the buildings around him did little to cut through the gloom, and twilight shaded the vatborn’s usually garish clothes a muted grayscale.

Ferrash followed the accumulating crowd, keeping an eye out for any signs of unrest. Ever since the purge, when the Protectorate leadership and the Keepers had killed large swathes of the population suspected to be harbouring rebellious intent, people had been worryingly quiet. Their rebellious intent hadn’t disappeared; it had just been pressed down into a volcano long overdue eruption. The line that the Keepers protected the Protectorate had never quite rung so untrue.

The crowd led him down a ramp to the next level, which shielded itself from the snow thanks to the floor of the surface level. Snow swirled in from air grates in the ceiling and caught in the dim night lights, but they were spared the worst of the weather down here.

A message appeared in his implants. The sender had redacted their details. It was clumsy enough that Ferrash could have figured it out, but he didn’t need to. Vannis Proglimen may have thought this meeting was his idea, but Ferrash had arranged it.

Don’t be late. Ferrash rolled his eyes. He wasn’t about to be late. Too much rode on this. He rested his hand on his pistol and split off from the crowd to wait at a nearby lift. Triff 5-70-42 was a coordinate two levels down, in a textiles warehouse that hadn’t been touched for the past few months. Fewer bodies to clothe, since the purge.

He shoved aside a brief tick of anger as he stood staring down the shaft, waiting for the lift to arrive. The purge was partly Proglimen’s fault. As the Proctor, he held power of veto over some of the Primary Committee’s decisions. If he thought the committee and its chair weren’t holding true to the Protectorate’s values, it was his job to let them know about it. But he hadn’t vetoed the purge. Ferrash had seen the results: bodies lining the streets; blood in the gutters; informants choking down gas; soldiers beaten and broken; a whole city block reclaimed by freezing ocean, faces gasping for air even as they froze; the planet Munab invaded and bombed. It had been the reason he and Bek had defected.

Not that that had lasted.

In the wake of that cleanup – the evidence of which had been tidied away with a rapidity only the Protectorate could muster – what was left of the popular conscience latched onto old stories and breathed new life into them. With casualties so indiscriminate, the simple, long-rumoured answer suggested itself: a secret police. The Reiart. Whispers ran between the vats of every planet. Even members of the Primary Committee spent their days looking over their shoulders, waiting for a knife between their shoulder blades. The Proctor, Proglimen, thought he controlled the Reiart. He was safe. He didn’t need to worry. But clearly he had noticed a few orders of his gone awry, a few actions carried out he hadn’t authorised. A little was expected. A lot was a worry. So he had demanded to meet an operative for answers.

With a hydraulic groan, the lift rose from the ground and its doors opened to accept Ferrash. Two vatborn joined him in silence. They hugged the wall on the right-hand side, keeping as much distance between them and him as possible, and they shrank away from his eyes when he glanced at them. The next level down, they left him alone.

Ferrash gripped his pistol tighter. Muscle memory filled in for the anxiety he should have felt. Its absence disturbed him almost as much as if he had been using no inhibitors at all. With doses like this, there was always a risk the emotions would never return... but did he have anything left worth keeping?

By the time he reached the warehouse, the cold had made his nose numb. He cupped his hands to his face and blew to warm it, scanning the racks of clothes to either side as he walked.

‘Stop there’ a man called. ‘Hands where I can see them.’

Ferrash obliged and glanced to his left. ‘Proctor.’

Surprised, the man jerked forwards into the light. The hood he wore stopped any light reaching his face, but it gleamed from the furniture of the pistol he had aimed at Ferrash. ‘Keepers... How...?’ He ran his free hand over his jaw and tried to regain his composure, with a little success. ‘You come here in the open, with your face out for anyone to see, and you call me by title? Do you even know how the game works?’

‘It’s not a game,’ Ferrash said. ‘It’s a job. I’d figure you’d know that, if you’re the one in charge.’

Proglimen shook his head, his lips pressed into a hard line. ‘I know my orders used to make it to your commander. Either they don’t anymore, or they’re not listening. I need to speak with them.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘What?’

‘You really think you had control, don’t you?’

Proglimen took another step, and the pistol became a blurred shape a foot from his skull. ‘I called you here.’

‘True enough. As you said, you wanted to talk. You sent an order out. Someone answered.’ Ferrash shrugged, hands still in the air by his head. ‘I’d forgive you for thinking you called the shots, but you never did.’

As he spoke, Ferrash monitored the emotional undercurrents in Proglimen’s face: doubt, anger, concern, impulse. When his finger tightened on the trigger, Ferrash took hold of his wrist, pivoted, and swept the man’s legs out from under him with a kick. Proglimen yelped and dropped the pistol before crashing down onto his hip.

Still holding onto his wrist, Ferrash drew his own pistol and aimed it between the man’s wide eyes. ‘You should have vetoed the purge, Proctor.’

‘You’re making a mistake.’ Proglimen’s lips curled into a snarl. ‘The Reiart will flay you alive if you kill me. And why would I have vetoed it? They were splitters. Rebels. It was in the Protectorate’s interest to…’

‘Spare me the threats.’ And spare me your excuses. There was no point carrying on with this. Ferrash had come here to kill the man; he didn’t need to draw it out. Proglimen was a weak link in the chain, more worried about pandering to the needs of the Protectorate’s committees and their stifling grip on power than to the people. He was a weak link who had cost billions of lives by doing nothing.

Weak link he may be, but everything in the Protectorate was chained to his actions, and that’s why Ferrash had to take his place.

Ferrash toggled the safety on his pistol. Proglimen’s eyes widened, a hint of indignation stealing across their mirrored surfaces. ‘You can’t. The Reiart—’

He put a shot through Proglimen’s skull. ‘I am the Reiart.’

Chapter Three

By the time the shuttle reached the flagship, Palia was struggling to keep her breathing under control, let alone the Empyrean. The energy roiled inside her – clutching, grabbing, oscillating within the bounds of its existence as her doubt and anger fuelled it. It was right to forgive, but she couldn’t.

Why did she really not want to tell her mother what had happened? Palia forced herself to slow down and think about it. She gripped tight to the fabric of her trousers and glared at the approaching hangar, breathing in, breathing out, trying to slow everything down. Green light flickered in the corner of her eye. She ignored it. The truth was, this was what she didn’t want people to see. She didn’t want them to see how being empyrric had changed her. She didn’t want to see the fear in them, all day every day, wherever she went. She wondered how the Keepers coped. Then she tried to stop wondering, to stop thinking at all and just let everything wash past her.

Bit by bit, the thoughts submerged themselves. Bit by bit, she relaxed. When Palia opened her eyes again, the shuttle had landed inside one of the flagship’s main hangars, surrounded by the reassuring blur of everyday existence.

She knew the other funeral guests would be making their way back here soon, after the celebration, so she started to walk. She could have gone straight back to her ship, since it was refuelling nearby, but she didn’t think she could face Bek so soon after facing everyone else’s judgement. Instead, she let him know she was making a detour and headed for Fabien’s chambers. He wouldn’t be there yet, of course, but she could wait for him alone.

The corridors were quiet. The ship’s time marked it near evening, and most would be sharing a meal with friends and family, or on their way to do so. The few people she did pass nodded respectfully to her.

‘Mater Tennic!’ a merchant called to her as he solidified the membrane to his storefront. He rushed to halt the process now that he had seen her.

Palia winced. Ever since she had stopped the previous Magister’s attempt to attack Hesperex, the people who lived on the flagship had seen her as their personal saviour. In reality, the only danger they had been in was from the Protectorate fleets, and Palia had done little to stop them. Quite the opposite, in fact. But the public had fixated on the story of a mother’s revenge and so always gave her a mother’s prefix, no matter how much she hated its association.

‘Please, Mater Tennic, I would like you to have this.’ As the membrane dissolved again, the man reached through and pulled out a large bottle. He presented it to her, and she tried to decline with a polite gesture, but he pressed it into her hands. ‘Spored Spicewine, straight from the flats of Seylenon. Please, take it. For your troubles.’

‘I...’ Palia tried not to sigh. ‘Thank you.’

The merchant, apparently pleased by a gift given, grinned at her and set off down the corridor whistling. Palia carried on, clasping the bottle to her breast.

In Fabien’s chambers, she slumped onto the nearest couch, still hugging the wine, and shut her eyes.

she sent.

Palia raised an eyebrow at the bottle of wine.

* * *

Two hours later, the two glasses of spicewine Palia had poured had bloomed, filling the room with its subtle aroma. She stood on the balcony, which had a prime view over the local community gardens. The far boundary hazed in the distance, only becoming clearer where it curved inwards to form a man-made bowl of greenery. Thousands of people milled about, gathered in raucous laughter or animated debate. Couples – and triples, and more besides – kissed in the shade of orchards while children splashed and screamed in the central lake.

Palia watched them, her eyes glassy. She only paid attention to the Empyrean, its ebb and flow marked by the discrete points that made up the crowd. Somewhere out there, she sensed other empyrrics – their psyches etched curious black holes into the fabric of the Empyrean. She counted two, at the moment, and one of those was the woman assigned as her new patron. Pins prickled at Palia’s insides at the thought of whatever she might teach her. ‘After the funeral’, the woman had said. Tomorrow? Next week? Any time was too soon.

‘Sorry I kept you waiting.’

Palia turned from the window to see Fabien folding his cloak over the back of the couch.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s not like I have anything better to do.’ Except track down Ferrash.

Fabien eyed the bottle and glasses. ‘A sitting-down kind of talk, I see?’

She sighed, letting her shoulders slump, and went to sit on the couch. ‘Yeah, I guess it is.’ She picked up the glass nearest her and swirled its contents. Fine gold bands wound through the dark liquid, thread-thin and glowing with their own luminosity, marking the presence of the spores introduced during the fermentation process. Weird thing to add to a drink, really. She took a sip, and tiny bursts of flavour fizzed along her tongue.

Fabien lowered himself to the seat beside her and examined the other glass. ‘Is this one of mine?’

‘A gift from an admirer.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Again.’

He grimaced. ‘At least they’ll be out of your orbit soon, unlike your mother. I’ve had calls from her daily. Five years she goes without needing to check on you and as soon as you reappear, she wants to know everything. I will admit I can sympathise, but I understand why you cut her out. Was that what you needed to talk about?’

‘No.’ With a grimace of her own, Palia cupped the glass in both hands and rested her wrists on her thighs so it dangled between her legs, refracting light across them. ‘I guess I just want to know if I’m doing the right thing.’

‘In going after Ferrash?’

‘Yes. No. In... everything.’ She chewed at her lower lip, trying to tug words out of her emotions rather than flames for a change. ‘Everyone hates me for what happened with Derren. They hate me for leaving. They hate me for staying away. And as for Ash... I made him leave. I forgot about him, I put him in that position. What if he hates me for it? What if he doesn’t even need saving, or finding? What if he’s happy enough where he is?’

‘He’s in the Protectorate.’

‘And?’

‘By law, I’m not sure he’s allowed to be happy.’ Fabien’s lips curled up a fraction, almost in apology for what was half joke, half terrifying truth.

Palia sighed and attempted to gather her thoughts. As usual, there were no words behind the ‘why’s she asked herself – just an awful, gut-wrenching churn that stabbed through her chest and wrapped a tight band around her shoulders. She just had to go after him. She had to make things right. And she couldn’t explain it. With a shudder, she brought the lid down on that emotion and pushed it aside. While she may have forgotten Ferrash, she hadn’t forgotten the tug of that emotion and what it could make her do. She recalled the blistering light of an inferno in the Empyrean, the unstoppable hunger of it as it reached out to devour everything around her. She remembered love building upon new and uncertain love until the air was thick with feedback potential, boiling, tearing, cascading... and then nothing. Waking up empty, with gaps her mind couldn’t comprehend.

Fabien squeezed her knee, and she threw him a strained smile. ‘I just... I’m not sure I’m equipped for this. I’m not sure I’m a good person.’

‘Does it matter if you’re not?’ He kept a straight face, but she caught the flash of sympathy her words had sparked in him.

‘It does to me.’

He nodded, and they remained in companionable silence for the next few minutes, sipping at their wine and listening to the sounds of life beyond the balcony.

At length, Fabien said, ‘Whatever you do next, whether you go after him or not, that’s for you to decide.’ That was true enough. The Consulate had made Palia a pestor following the Magister’s death – the previous Magister’s, of course. Fabien was Magister now. The Consulate had voted him in shortly after the events around Hesperex. He ruled the Hegemony, and Palia’s new position as pestor made her an independent investigator who answered to no one, as long as she acted in pursuit of her objectives. That, officially, was to continue investigating the prototype technology the Magister had been planning to unleash on Hesperex. It just so happened that that objective would take her to the places she would be most likely to find Ferrash.

‘I’ll support you either way,’ Fabien continued, ‘but you should know that we’ve had word of him.’

Palia snapped her head round. ‘Where?’ They had lost all trace of him after the fight with the Magister. Some sign, any sign, would finally give her somewhere to start.

‘Bek found the lead, since your ship’s apparently still in the Protectorate’s contacts. An execution order came through for Ferrash.’ When Palia started at this, Fabien winced and raised a hand to calm her. ‘For him to carry out, sorry, not for him. The target’s on Munab, so we can safely assume that’s where he’s headed.’

‘But why?’ Palia shook her head. ‘He and Bek defected. How can he be back working for them?’

Fabien shrugged. ‘Did they ever tell anyone they defected? Or take any direct action against the Protectorate?’

‘Well, no...’

‘Then I suppose as far as the Protectorate are concerned, it never happened.’

She conceded the point. ‘Who’s the target?’

‘Ellit Progaeryon, the commander of the mechanised division down there.’

Palia dug around the painful gaps in her memories, trying to recall what she could of their time on Munab. It took a while, but she remembered there had been another man down there with them, and his name might have been Ellit. And...

‘I think he was Ash’s father?’ she said.

Fabien blinked, taken aback. ‘I... wouldn’t know.’

‘It must be a front. He must be going to save him, not kill him. And I’ve seen those mechs, Fabien. They’re massive! It’ll be easy to find him. And if I find him, I find Ash.’ Palia grinned, but her smile fell when she saw Fabien’s expression.

‘Palia, Munab’s still in the middle of a civil war. Even if you manage to get onto the surface, which side will you fight for? If you back the populace and people find out where you’re from... We still have a truce. We can’t commit anyone to Munab unless we want our war to resume.’

‘So it’s a civil war that Ash is heading straight into the middle of. If anything, that’s more reason to go after him.’ She tapped a finger against the side of her glass. ‘I can cloak myself with the Empyrean.’

‘You can?’

‘Well no, not personally, but I know other empyrrics can do it.’ When Ferrash had been kidnapped on Sirat, the empyrric the old Magister had sent to do it had removed all trace of their presence from the witnesses’ minds. Palia wouldn’t know where to start, but she wasn’t about to admit that. ‘Besides, if I can break my own memories, it can’t be that hard to break someone else’s.’

Fabien pressed his lips into a thin line. ‘You broke your own memories because you went up against a trained empyrric before you could control your own power and tried to do something no one had done before. At least spend some time learning from Archivist Lilesh before you go after him. By then, we might have found a way to sneak you onto the surface. And I... I would appreciate it, knowing you went in prepared.’

After a large sip from her glass, Palia set it back on the table, almost sloshing the remnants over the rim. ‘When I fought the Magister, it was because I didn’t have time to do anything else. I was there, he was there, and he needed to be stopped. This is the same! You think Ash’ll hang around down there?’

‘You can always pick up his trail after—’

‘Can I? We couldn’t pick up his trail leaving the flagship, and we knew exactly where he started that time. All we have now is a kill order and a whole planet to search. Spot the difference?’ She worked the muscles in her jaw before continuing. ‘If I wait, I lose him. I just need an excuse to explain why I’m going.’

For a while, Fabien said nothing. He stared at a painted metal panel on the wall opposite, tracing the abstract shapes and bold colours with an unfocused gaze. ‘We never recovered all our data from Munab,’ he said. ‘You picked up the prototype, but that’s all we got. If there’s anything still down there and the Protectorate get hold of it...’

Then the Protectorate would be able to replicate the technology the Magister had incorporated into the flagship. The Protectorate landing themselves with the power to burn whole planets out of the sky wasn’t something she wanted to think about. She wasn’t sure they even had the resources to pull it off, but it was still a real concern. Thanks to the previous Magister’s underhand dealing with an underground movement on Munab, any remnants of the prototype’s research were sitting ducks for capture.

‘You want me to make sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands?’ Palia asked. That was as good an excuse as any.

Fabien exhaled, thinking. Then he looked her in the eye and nodded. ‘If there is yet anything to find, yes. If not, find him.’

Chapter Four

It had been a week since the funeral, and Fabien had been neck deep in conversations at all hours of day and night since then. He desperately wanted to sleep, but it was daytime here. The lights on the Carabalite forge ring synchronised to the day-night cycle of Carabal’s main colony, Volta, at almost the polar opposite of Standard Chron. It was